Mississippi Goddamn, Cont'd

Given the events of the last few days, were I Thad Cochran down there in Mississippi, I wouldn't want to see this quote popping up in Mother Times at all.

So it makes sense that, after an inconclusive initial primary in Mississippi, Mr. Cochran seeks to win their June 24 runoff by tapping that much-larger pool of past supporters. "He's capped out, and we're not," argued Henry Barbour, who's helping direct a pro-Cochran political action committee.

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Dear Henry: Eric Cantor's pollsters would like a word from the steam grate where they're living these days.

And this is a bit of a dodge from Mother Times.

Midterm primaries draw fewer than that. In 2010, for example, as the Tea Party wave neared its peak, just one in five showed up for House and Senate primaries. That roughly matches the proportion of Mississippians participating in last week's contest. A third candidate drew just enough of the 313,000 votes cast to deny Mr. McDaniel or Mr. Cochran the 50 percent needed for victory.

Well, yeah, but the fact is that McDaniel, cockfighting enthusiast and a man whose supporters have a predilection for breaking into nursing homes and being accidentally locked in places where votes are being stored, still outpolled Cochran, and the numbers haven't gotten any more promising for the latter in the past couple of weeks. And the demographic split within Mississippi is fascinating both on its face, and in the historical resonance that the campaign has developed.

Some say the differences between the supporters of Mr. Cochran, a senator since 1978, who is the face of the party establishment, and those of Mr. McDaniel, a former host of a conservative radio show, go beyond the issues in the race. "There's a divide between the 'country club' Republicans and what I call the 'deer camp' Republicans," said Jon C. Lewis, a Hinds County constable, who, as a McDaniel supporter, puts himself in the latter camp. "Their problem is that there's more of us than there is of them."

This is a political divide that goes back at least as far as the old Civil War aphorism, "Rich man's war, poor man's fight," that was the mantra of Confederate soldiers when discussing the plantation aristocracy that the grunts saw has having led them into the cannons at Gettysburg. That divide never truly closed.

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For example, at the beginning of March, 1917, Woodrow Wilson proposed arming American merchant ships to defend themselves against German submarines. Under the leadership of Wisconsin's Robert LaFollette, a group of 12 senators wishing to keep the United States out of the European war determined to filibuster the Armed Ships Bill to death by running out the clock on the legislative session, which they managed to do, but not before a wild final night sessionin which LaFollette went wild when he discovered that he had been dropped from the list of speakers. He checked his travelling bag to see if the pistol he ordinarily carried was there. It had been removed by his son, future senator Robert LaFollette, Jr. because he was afraid his old man would plug someone. The younger LaFollette's caution was well-taken. At one point, with LaFollette screaming vainly for recognition, Democratic senators rushed him. One of LaFollette's allies, a senator from Oregon named Harry Lane, spotted a gun under the jacket of Kentucky's Ollie James. Lane picked up a sharpened file that he intended to use as a knife to protect his leader, who was threatening to throw a spittoon at the presiding officer. The filibuster succeeded. Wilson went wild. And the Senate changed its rules and created the cloture system that still exists in most cases today, much to the current president's despair. The bill passed in the next session.

(Not for nothing but I have spent a decade trying to get a publisher interested in a book about this filibuster. Deluge your local publishing house!)

As it happens, the two Mississippi senators were on opposite sides of the fight. John Sharp Williams was a Democrat, an elegant, erudite man who lined up with Wilson. By the standards of Mississippi politicians of the day, Williams largely eschewed large-scale race-baiting. This could not be said of his fellow senator, James K. Vardaman, another Democrat, who was a virulent racist even by the standards of Mississippi politicians of the day (He even dressed entirely in white and became known as The White Chief.) Vardaman was a master of using racial hatred to gin up political support, especially among the poor white farmers of the Mississippi hill country. His defeat of wealthy planter LeRoy Percy was said to have broken the political power of the Mississippi planter gentry. Essentially arguing "rich man's war, poor man's fight," Vardaman joined LaFollette, who saw in Vardaman a champion of the ordinary worker in the spirit of the Progressive Era, which was unfortunate, in opposing the bill. With the Civil War still fresh in many minds, Williams summoned up the romantic glory of The Lost Cause, while Vardaman brought up the dismembered and bloody ghosts of the Confederagte grunts. He voted against the war and was immediately vilified as a German sympathizer, as were all the senators who had filibustered the bill.

That's the ancient binary at work here in a context of modern political technology. Cochran and the country-club Republicans against McDaniel and the deer-camp Republicans. Rich man's war, poor man's fight.

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